


Songs of Shadow, Songs of Blood

by Drag0nst0rm



Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Alternate Universe - Sirens, Canonical Character Death, Dark, F/M, First Age, Gen, Hopeful Ending, Horror, Mind Control, mild body horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-20
Updated: 2020-08-20
Packaged: 2021-03-06 16:21:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,009
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26001814
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Drag0nst0rm/pseuds/Drag0nst0rm
Summary: There are shadows in the forests of Beleriand.Some of them have teeth.
Relationships: Elrond Peredhel & Elros Tar-Minyatur & Maglor | Makalaurë, Elwing & Idril Celebrindal, Eärendil/Elwing (Tolkien)
Comments: 22
Kudos: 96
Collections: Tolkien Reverse Summer Bang 2020





	Songs of Shadow, Songs of Blood

**Author's Note:**

  * For [LadyBrooke](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadyBrooke/gifts).



> With many thanks to the wonderful LadyBrooke, who created the artwork and prompt that inspired this story. 
> 
> A nod must also be made to "Nightfall" by Blind Guardian, which I listened to on repeat while brainstorming this.

i.

Makalaure is born with too sharp teeth and too powerful cries.

His father calls him _strong-voiced Finwe,_ and the first half of that is just fact, and the second half is him very decidedly making a point.

Feanaro’s teeth are just as sharp, and his voice is just as potent, but it doesn’t matter because in the light of the Trees, that’s all they are. Just a shade too sharp, just a shade too _much,_ in a way that Nolofinwe and his descendants aren’t, but it doesn’t matter because they are still of Finwe.

(Maitimo’s voice is a shade too sweet, but his instinct when they fight is to punch, not to bite despite his sharp teeth. Tyelkormo is just the opposite. Neither of them knows what Makalaure’s talking about when he says he can’t sleep because he can feel feathers shifting beneath his skin.)

(He can only ever feel them in the shadows of his room or under the starlight they glimpse when they travel to the outer edges of Aman. The light of the Trees soothes them away, but as soon as the shadows envelop him, the feeling is back and worse than ever.)

_At Cuivenien, sometimes elves would walk alone amongst the trees and not come back, and they said the Hunter had taken them._

_At Cuivenien, sometimes elves would walk alone amongst the trees and come back . . . different, and they didn’t speak of that at all._

_They didn’t speak to them either. They didn’t know what was wrong, but they knew enough to be afraid, so they shunned them until they vanished back among the trees._

_Miriel does not walk alone, and she does not meet the Hunter. She goes into the trees in a group half a dozen strong and meets a spirit of a different sort, and she walks away with nails as sharp as claws and wings as soft and dark as the night that surrounds them that she does not yet know how to use._

_She also walks away with a voice as beautiful as the stars above, and no one thinks to challenge her, even for a moment, when she walks back to their camp._

_No one thinks to ask where the other five went either, and Miriel alone bears the memory of a shadow with teeth that dripped with blood._

When the Trees go out, something shifts in Makalaure, and suddenly his back is a mess of feathers and blood.

The pain is bewildering in a world already gone mad, and he doesn’t understand the twisted weight that is suddenly bearing him down.

No one notices in the dark. No one notices until Maitimo finally manages to light a torch.

The flickering light of the flames reveal their grandfather, blood spilling out under the light of the fire.

The light also reveals the blood running down Makalaure’s arms, spilling over from his shredded back where twisted wings, deformed and wasted from lack of use, hang heavy in the revealing dark.

Their grandfather has been killed by a monster that has long since fled.

But Makalaure stands as another monster, now revealed.

 _Gold-cleaver_ his mother calls him, and his hands have spun golden music upon his harp for all to hear.

The claws that have cut bloody furrows into his palms do not look like they are suited for anything so fine.

His brothers, he realizes in a shocked sort of calm, are not unchanged. The dark has claimed something from them all.

But only Makalaure has thick black wings that shudder on his back and refuse to move, refuse to press themselves back inside his skin and stay there, like they should, like they always should have -

“You look terrible,” Carnistir breathes, but then he is pressing cloth against his back to mop up the blood, so Makalaure flinches but stays quiet.

Terrible. Yes. Terrifying would be even more accurate, he thinks.

He cannot help but envy Carnistir, whose teeth have only grown the slightest bit sharp.

_“There is healing beneath the Trees,” Oromë promises, and he looks straight at her when he says it._

_Miriel does not need healing. She is swift-wing and sharp-claw and silver-voice, and there is nothing wrong with her. The rest of the camp must agree with her; otherwise they would have shunned her as they shunned the others who returned from the forest different than when they went in._

_(Of course, none of the others had her silver-voice. Everyone has been more amenable to everything she’s said since she’s gained it, and she tries not to wonder about why.)_

_But even she could do nothing against the Hunter should he come, and Finwe loves the light so dearly, and she loves Finwe so dearly that it is not really a choice._

_(And perhaps, under this light, if it is truly as healing and wondrous as they say . . . perhaps she can finally say yes to Finwe there. Perhaps she can finally be sure as to why he keeps asking.)_

His songs are so much stronger now.

He sings strength to his brothers as they run to tell their father what has happened, and they run without tiring, without complaining, without even once thinking of rest.

They run until the Ambarussa’s feet are bloody, and then he chokes on his tongue and tells himself he will not sing again.

_The light is beautiful and wondrous and everything else they have been promised._

_It also burns hot and fiercely until every last feather has been scorched away._

_Her teeth dull and her voice fades and her claws soften until she feels like a mere ghost of herself, floating through the light._

_(Her teeth still tear through meat easier than anyone else’s, and she still must be oh, so careful with her weavings lest she rip what she does not mean to tear. And her voice . . . she has a lovely voice. Perhaps she always has.)_

_(But her wings are gone, and she still feels like a ghost.)_

_The others look at her now in a way they didn’t before, but she is here, after all, which means she must be safe, so they do not shun her. Not quite._

_Finwe is the only one who lingers in conversation with her, the only one who does not flinch from her touch. She feels real, with him._

_It’s still not enough._

His father’s eyes burn with a light he has never before seen.

His wings are just as weakened as Makalaure’s, but he still stretches them out proudly, wide and dark, like the smoke rising from his fire.

Looking at them, Makalaure is almost not ashamed of his own.

He draws strength from that when he breaks his own rule and sings as they search for their father in the great and terrible dark after he has vanished in his grief. He sings a call, an entreaty, a command.

_Come back to us. Come back._

He sings until his voice breaks, and it turns back into a plea.

It is then that his father appears behind him and touches his shoulder, and his eyes are full of nothing but wonder for his son.

“I heard you,” he says. “I must have been leagues away, but I heard you.”

Already his father has wrested some kind of control from his wings, and their comforting weight curls around Makalaure. The warmth feels impossibly good in the dark.

“I’m sorry,” Makalaure whispers because he has learned this lesson already, and he has learned it well.

“Don’t be,” his father says fiercely. “Never be sorry, not for this. Your voice is beautiful, Kanafinwe. _You_ are beautiful. Never be ashamed of that.”

Looking at his father, he can almost believe it.

_She loves Feanaro before she ever sees him._

_That does not change in the slightest when he is placed in her exhausted arms, and she sees that he already has every single one of his too-sharp teeth._

_He blazes in her hands with all the fire she can no longer summon, and she thinks maybe there is a chance he can burn bright enough to make his own shadows and survive even under the consuming light of these Trees._

_She wishes she still had wings to shelter him under until he was ready to do so._

His father’s voice has grown strong too.

It draws their people to him through the dark. It draws them onward, promising everything they want returned: warmth and light and hope.

It draws them on to the waves beating against the shore, and the blood that waits there.

It draws them on to their deaths.

It draws Makalaure onward too.

He raises his voice for his father’s cause, but he never makes the mistake of thinking he is anything but monstrous again.

_It is dark in the halls of the dead where not even the most determined spark of light can reach. Her fëa grows stronger there until she can shape herself as she wishes._

_She keeps her fingers soft and blunt so they can trail over Vaire’s tapestries as she passes among them, but out of the shadows she shapes for herself great wings like the starry sky she still misses._

_She feels more alive now that she is dead than she ever did beneath the Trees._

_(She tells herself she stays for their sake. For the sake of Finwe, who deserves a wife who will not have to think twice every time before she speaks to ensure that the appeal in her voice is not too strong; for the sake of Feanaro, who deserves more than a monster for a mother.)_

_(This is partly true, but mostly she stays because she cannot bear to burn again.)_

When the sun rises, his wings shudder and fold back beneath his skin. It hurts, but it is nothing compared to the hurt of losing his father and brother and knowing he can never face his mother again, so he rejoices in the pain and in the way he can hide from himself once more.

When the sun sets, his wings burst back out from underneath his skin, and the blood runs down his back once more in endless penance.

When his uncle arrives, he refuses to meet with him when the sun is anywhere but high in the sky.

His uncle knows. His uncle has already seen.

But in the brilliant light of this new dawn, those days seem like a fevered nightmare, and no one seems quite ready to believe the worst of it.

His uncle’s eyes flick to his back, but then he shakes his head in dismissal, and he never once mentions it.

(The Silmarils contain the light of the Trees. If they get them back - if he can just hold one once more - maybe he can burn away his monstrousness once and for all.)

(Anything has to better than this.)

ii.

The man who is supposed to carry Elwing to safety when Doriath falls decides she is too heavy to carry and so he drops her and runs. He does not take the Silmaril with him when he does so. Perhaps he thinks it will only draw attention.

Perhaps he thinks it will burn.

(She does not think of this then. When it happens, she thinks only of her terror as she calls after him. But later – Later she wonders.)

She can still hear the screaming in the distance when he does it. She can hear it, but not see what is causing it, and she is alone in the woods with nowhere to go.

She tries to run after him until her feet are bloody.

Then she runs some more.

She runs and runs and wishes that she could fly above it all, that she could fight and not just be something to be dropped when the danger grows too near.

She runs until she runs right through a shadow that drifts on the wind.

 _Oh, little one,_ it sings in delight, _come here._

Shadows, she learns quickly, can have teeth.

But this one, at least, gives her teeth too.

_There is a shadow under the Ice._

_There is a shadow, and Itarille hears music so beautiful that she can almost forget how cold she is, even wrapped in every last one of her furs and held tight in her mama’s arms._

_There is a shadow, and then there is a crevasse right in front of them, where the ice breaks off and plunges into the freezing water below, and the gap is not far. Everyone else has jumped it, but her mama pauses, and Itarille knows she is listening to the music._

_No one else has stopped to listen. She doesn’t know why. Even knowing that music isn’t something you can catch with your bare hands – she’s not a baby, after all, not anymore – she still can’t help reaching for it anyway._

_Her mother doesn’t jump. She just walks forward towards the icy waters and the music, and then she slides right in._

She is unique (alone) until she meets Idril, whose wings have feathers that look like shards of ice and who, when no one is looking, tears through raw fish like they are the softest, finest bread.

( _I got lost in the cold, once,_ Idril tells her, _all alone on a journey, a long, long time ago. I came back different. Most people didn’t notice. Or at least, it was easier for them to pretend they didn’t._ )

The polite version of the story of how Elwing came to Sirion is that she was saved by faithful retainers instead of by her own bloodstained claws and wings. She has heard this story so many times that she has almost started to believe it is reality. No one ever comments on this. Elwing knows exactly what Idril means when she says sometimes it is just easier for everyone else to pretend.

(Elwing does not quite catch the waver in Idril’s voice when she says she was _alone._ But then, Idril’s voice is as sweet as her own and quite a bit older.)

Earendil does not have wings or claws, and he does not eat fish raw.

He has a very nice voice, however, and very sharp teeth.

_There is blood in the water, and it is beautiful._

_Itarille is cold, so cold it feels like fire and her brain feels like slushed up snow, but she can see the red spiraling through the water, and it is important even though she can’t remember why, so she reaches for it, one blue tinged hand reaching up even though the water stabs at her muscles._

_There had been a shadow beneath the Ice, and that shadow is here now, darkness tangled up in the blood._

You, _the shadow says._ I like you.

_There is red, and there is shadow, and then suddenly the water is not so cold anymore._

Elwing wonders, sometimes, where her brothers are. If somewhere beneath the trees of Doriath they flit from branch to branch with wings of night and sing prey and foes alike to a sleep from which they’ll never wake.

She remembers, other times, that not all shadows let you go once they catch you, and that the one that had caught her had already had blood on its teeth.

_When she comes up out of the water, her skin is pale and tinged very faintly blue. It stays that way, no matter how close they put her to the fire._

_There are also webs between her fingers and wings like shards of ice that are low and close to her back._

_They had sliced through the water so easily, pushing her up and up and up –_

_Her mother had never come back up._

_Her father had stared at her in horror, until she had said, “Atar?” and her voice had sounded so strange._

_But he had picked her up and held her close at once after that, and he never commented on her strangeness again._

Every time Earendil leaves, she forces herself not to say a word until the boat is well out of sight.

They learned the first time when she tried to sing him off that if she did, whoever was steering the boat would turn it right back around at the first hint of the longing in her voice. Earendil himself can resist her, but it is difficult even for him, and what is the point when it is so much simpler for her to just refrain from singing at all?

(Once he is gone, however, she sings and sings with all the power she can summon, and she wonders if that is why his boat always returns when all the others are only ever lost, lost, lost.)

(She wonders if Idril managed to sing herself and her husband safely to shore.)

_Selwe is old, as old as great-grandfather was, and Selwe watches her with narrowed eyes._

_“She’s not one of us,” she hears him telling Atar. “Not anymore. Leave her to the ice.”_

_Atar shouts at him, but Itarille still shivers for the first time in weeks._

_She does not feel the cold anymore, and she loves the way the water calls to her, but she still does not wish to be left alone out here._

Both of her babies have tiny, perfect wings from the moment they are born, but Elrond’s mouth is soft and toothless, and Elros’s smile is already sharp, though they are identical in every other respect.

She delights in the idea that she will someday be able to teach them how to fly.

It never occurs to her that she might not get the chance.

_Selwe is quiet, but he watches her. His eyes catch on her wings, her hands, her teeth._

_(Selwe fell during the Darkening and was trampled upon. Selwe hit his head very hard and has not heard quite right since.)_

_(Atar had looked at her so strangely until she began talking. She talks and talks at Selwe, but he only looks at her with ancient eyes and tells old stories of things that had crept in from the forest, still looking like elves but that had become little more than shadow and teeth.)_

She can convince her advisors of anything if she tries hard enough, and Earendil if she’s willing to strain her voice to the limit, but she cannot convince the Feanorian messengers of anything at all. They answer to another voice, an older one that survived even the cleansing fire of the Trees.

It will come to war, she realizes, and for the first time in years she is afraid.

_When the sun rises, her wings melt like water, and the webbing between her hands melts with it._

_She can still hear the water calling her, but she is no longer sure what will happen if she answers it._

_When the moon rises, and her wings return, she is relieved._

_She does not know what’s happening, exactly, but she feels warm again, and that’s more important than any amount of pain._

The Silmaril is -

The Silmaril burns, and it burns her wings the worst, and she can’t sing right when she holds it, and she hates it, hates it with every fiber of her being, but she also can’t bear to give it up because -

Because when she holds it, she remembers being a little girl running through the woods who has not yet met a shadow with blood on its teeth, and there is something about that she desperately does not want to forget.

She feels clean when she holds it, and for as long as it is in her hands, she almost doesn’t mind the burn.

_When Earendil is born, he is tiny and perfect, but he does not have wings, and she wishes, so fiercely, that she could give those to him._

_He will need every gift she can give him if the walls of the city fall and he is still to survive._

_But he has teeth as sharp as hers, and he swims for hours without needing breath, and he hears the call of the sea as strongly as she ever did._

_And the sun has no fears for him; his teeth sharpen as the moon rises, but he feels no pain, and she thinks it might be because he was born under this light, scorching though it is. He walks under it more easily than she does, and she is glad of that._

_Selwe has whispered his old tales to Maeglin, and she does not like the way he looks at her son._

Sirion burns, and Earendil is still gone, and she is standing on the cliff at the edge of the city with the Silmaril burning through her hands.

She cannot sing right with the Silmaril in her hands, and the Feanorians -

The prince’s voice is so strong that she almost wants to go to him, never mind his dripping sword, because that voice promises everything she so badly wants, and she could have it all if she would only give back a stolen gem, such a little thing, such a tiny thing -

The sun trembles on the verge of giving in to the night before it finally surrenders. Her wings flare out, light and easy.

By the light of the burning city, she sees his tear through his skin.

They are twisted, weakened, unused, and he cries out in pain as the blood flows down his back, and in that moment of freedom, she hurls herself off the cliff, towards the rocks below.

Her wings flare out and catch her.

He doesn’t even dare try and trust his.

iii.

He is a monster. He knows this. He has known this for so long now that he has almost accepted it.

That his brothers also bear some part of his curse does not dissuade him; he loves them, loves them desperately, but he knows full well that they all bear blood on their hands.

(The events of Nargothrond do not surprise him. He wonders, though, if it would have happened in another city, a city that had not burrowed so far into the darkness of stone as to bury itself in perpetual night. The sunlight burns the outer side of their natures away; can it touch their hearts as well?)

(He wants to think it does.)

They are all monsters, but he is the worst, and he knows it. He sees it in every blood drenched feather that insists on returning, night after night.

(They burn in the Dagor Bragollach. The sparks of Morgoth’s cursed fires catch in them and spread until his back is an agonized torch, but he is still almost not sorry, because at least at last they’ll be gone.)

(He wakes at sunset in Himring at the agony of new wings, darker and broader than ever before bursting through the burns that ravage his back. Maedhros is there in an instant, pressing cold water against his back, mopping up the blood, crooning a lullaby Maglor has not heard his brother sing since they were children.)

(The lullaby is much more persuasive now.)

_There are no words for what he is when Feanaro is growing up. If ever their language encompassed the ideas that he now struggles to name, the words have been set aside and intentionally forgotten. This is a peaceful land, and it needs no words for children who know they are different and who fear that difference might have killed their mothers. It has no words for a father who loves his son but sometimes cannot bear to look at him, who favors him above all others but will still not be satisfied with his presence alone._

_It has words for anger and hate and shame, but Feanaro thinks sometimes that those words are not enough because they do not quite seem to grasp the possessive fire that bubbles up in his veins when his father begins to speak of Indis._

_He thinks – there is a moment – He thinks he could have talked him out of it. He tries to talk his father out of it, and there is a moment where he knows that if he presses just a little harder, draws forth just a little more of his inner fire that it will be done and settled._

_But there is a look in his father’s eyes that he knows no other name for than fear, and though he barely understands what he is doing, he knows, deep in his gut, that if he presses for this now, he can never come back from it._

_He lets it go, and his father forgets and marries Indis and has normal children with normal voices who have normal arguments and who do not have to invent words to describe the wrongness inside of themselves._

_(There is an old word, monster, and it sits like acid on his tongue. But it means shunned-one, changed-one, and though he sometimes feels like an outcast, he has not been shunned, and he has always been like this. He has not been changed.)_

_(He changes the word and makes a new meaning. Monster: one who ought to change, and who, if they are ever discovered, will deserve to be shunned.)_

He does not change his mind on the nature of their affliction when he sees Elwing; why shouldn’t the princess of Doriath be a monster too?

There are already so many monsters in this broken world of theirs. He has no difficulty accepting the existence of another.

But the twins . . .

Elros’s teeth are too sharp (like Carnistir’s once were, but don’t think of that, don’t think - ), but everyone has a little darkness in them, and Elros, who is fierce and defiant but can come to see goodness even in kinslayers, has surely mastered his. No one who can embrace so fully and fiercely, so selflessly, can ever be truly monstrous, surely.

(And if he thinks of his own brothers’ embraces and the love behind them, and wonders, just for a moment, if perhaps they are not fully monstrous after all – that is different, surely. A little light does not negate their darkness, while the little ones are almost nothing but light.)

And Elrond - Elrond wraps his wings around his brother when the winter grows harsh, and Elrond has a voice that he could use to charm ships onto rocks, but he uses it instead to charm wounded kinslaying warriors to sleep when they have run out of poppy, and Elrond -

Elrond is not a monster, for all he has claws when the moon rises. Elros is not a monster, for all his wings are as dark as the shadows Maglor so fears.

For their sake, Maglor stretches out his wasted wings and teaches himself to fly.

The twins will need someone to teach them, after all, and how can he deny them this?

(How can he deny them anything?)

_For Nerdanel and their children’s sake, Feanaro prays – yes, prays, he will swallow his pride for this – that the children will be like his wife, and not like himself._

_Everyone who has ever spoken of Miriel to him has told him of her beauty, her grace, and her talent. They have told him, too, of how fragile she was; something in the Great Journey wearied her, they claim, but Feanaro knows better._

_Everyone else may be willing to ignore that Miriel gave birth to a monster, but he is not._

_He is drawn to fire, yes, but that is not the only red that calls to him; he is entranced by the sight of blood when it spills, and he knows all too well how sharp his teeth are and how young he carried them._

_He does not know what is wrong with him, but he knows something is, deeply, and whatever it is, he would spare his family that._

_(No one ever tells him that Miriel walked in shadow and came back changed. No one wants to speak ill of the dead, and they don’t stop to think what effect it might have on the living. Besides, Feanaro is brilliant and enchanting but normal, surely.)_

_(If they catch sight of his teeth, they ignore them in favor of his words.)_

_He prays, he hopes, he wants –_

_And then Maitimo is born with teeth already present and as sharp as his own, but still he cannot for a moment argue with Nerdanel when she declares him well made. He cannot even imagine doing so._

_He is perfect and precious and not monstrous at all. Feanaro will fight anyone who says otherwise._

_And if Maitimo is not monstrous, then perhaps – just perhaps –_

_Perhaps monstrousness is not inherently intertwined with Feanaro’s own nature after all._

The light in the sky is too far away to burn.

He dreams of it sometimes. Dreams of Earendil flying it through the sky. Dreams of Elwing flying to his ship while he stands uselessly reaching after her.

Forever and always just out of reach.

He dreams of it.

But he is not quite sure anymore that he wants the light that would burn his wings away. Not when he still has to teach the twins how to fly safely through the ever darkening skies. Not when they have proven so useful in capturing ever scarcer prey to feed what remains of family and followers both. Not when he can wrap them around his last remaining brother to comfort him when the nightmares grow too strong like their father had once done in that brief span after the Darkening when Maglor was still Makalaure.

(He misses that feeling. He dreams, sometimes, that he can feel that warmth still, and he longs for it far more than he longs for the gem’s burning light.)

He is still a monster, he knows, but monsters have their uses in a world where a greater monster is forever expanding his reach, so for now, at least, he will be glad of the sharpness of his teeth.

**Author's Note:**

> For a larger version of the picture, go [here!](https://sta.sh/026aswrdmsn9)


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